Apple Wants to Patent Its MacBook Air Design

The MacBook Air has a slim wedge-shaped design. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired

Hold on to your hats: An expanded patent application for the wedge-shaped aesthetic of the MacBook Air passed through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today.

The patent is for a portable computing device with a “wedge shaped top case” and a lid pivotally connected to the base via a hinge. Apple claims that the design contributes to the user’s impression of a device, its lightness, and its durability.

Components like a high-speed memory card and its connector are expressly designed to fit inside the unique shape of the device, which we better know as the MacBook Air.

Apple files for design patents relating to pretty much all of its products, and even goes so far as to patent the design of its stores. Although the company doesn’t always wield patents as weapons, Apple has gone after competitor Samsung for copycatting the design of the iPad in its Galaxy Tab tablet.

So could this mean that Apple is beefing up its patent library to wage war against the onslaught of ultrabooks heading our way? It could certainly be a step in that direction. There are now nine MacBook Air-related patent applications that have been lumped under this latest continuation, simply titled “Portable Computing Device.” If granted, Apple could theoretically use its patent to sweep Intel-based MacBook Air lookalikes off store shelves.

Image: Free Patents Online

Interestingly, Apple also filed a patent application for a way to control the brightness of OLED displays.

Currently, Apple doesn’t ship any devices with OLEDs — iPhones, iPads and MacBooks all use backlit LCD displays. Since OLED displays don’t have a a backlight, it can be a bit trickier to adjust their brightness. But Apple would accomplish this feat by converting an image to a logarithmic scale, dimming it, and then displaying that dimmed image.

Many are expecting a MacBook Pro refresh in the near future, but an OLED display isn’t something that’s anticipated for this update. Apple has filed patents relating to OLED displays before, though, so it could be something we’d see in future Mac or iOS devices.

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